The Insurrection

"Damn you," she said without rancor. "Don't start your damned double-think on me now!" "I'm not. But who does it have value for? The recipient @u.. or the sender?" "I don't pretend to understand that one--yet. But I will, I promise you!" @u "I'm sure you will," he soothed, his smile taking the offense from his words@u "You were always my best student, or you wouldn't be sitting where you are now. But unlike you, my love, I already know our mole's identity." "And you don't intend to share it with me?" she said resignedly.

"No, Susan, I don't," he said, his suddenly fiat tone contrasting sharply with his normal urbanity. Then he smiled ag@u "But it's a lovely game, my dear! I know--but does he know that I know? And if he does, does he know that I know that he knows that I know? Ad infinitum, of course." "Kevin Sanders," she said acidly, "if I didn't trust you more than my own mirror, I'd have you in irons under babble juice therapy this second!" "And, my dear," he purred, "if I didn't trust yotr--and know that you trust mc I would never have recommended you to run ONI, now would I?" Susan Krupskaya laughed and shook her held. "Hold out your glass, you rotten old bastard," she said affectionately.

"Here. The latest information for Captain M'tana." The tall man took the record chip and tucked it inside his tunic beside his holstered needler. He frowned. "You seem displeased." The observation was made gently, but there was a chuckle in the voice@u "No, sir. It's just.., just..." "Just that it goes against the grain to pass things to rebels.;?" "Well, yes, sir," the courier said unhappily.

Ater all, Oskar Dieter was the prime minister.

FORTRESS Ian Trevayne stood on the flag bridge of his new flagship, in orbit around Xanadu, and watched the great curve of the planet on the big screen. That blue, cloud-swirling loveliness woke the home-calling of his blood, and his eyes swung toward the constellation Xandies called the Hexagon. There, the astronomers asserted, to ay Sol.

How far was Sol from Zephrain? The question was a fascinating one for the theoretical astronomers (whose current best guess was seven hundred light-years), but of no significance whatsoever to the working spacers who traveled the mad ingeodesics of the warp lines. Yet Trevayne contemplated the sheer distances involved more often of late, deliberately dwelling on the immensity of space and time as a sort of tonic when his spirits flagged. For huge though the universe might be, Man's very presence here, in this system, was the best measure of his own stature. Seven centuries from Earth Trevayne had come, as the lonely radiation of light rode the vacuum. Surely after such a voyage as that he could accomplish what duty demanded.

He shook himself and dismissed that thought to consider the ship he rode. Shortly before the war, the Zephrain Fleet base had laid down a prototype fortress, larger even than a monitor and with far more mobility than the usual OWP'S station-keeping capaoilities. As far as Trevayne was concerned, anything mobile, however slow and clumsy, was a ship, and after completing it with major modifications, he'd "given it a name. It was now TFNS Sergei Ortega, and it was the largest self-propelled structure ever wrought by homo sapiens but not for long. The militant energy of the Rim had come together with the scientific wizardry slumbering at Zephrain RDS and birthed the five mammoth constructions that orbited alongside Ortega in various stages of incompletion, overshadowing even her bulk. Destroyer-sized construction ships slid between their massive ribs; tractored barges piled high with steel and beryllium and titanium from Zeptstrain's mammoth smelters shuttled back and forth among them; and fierce, tiny constellations of robotic welders lit their bones. Only one was even partially operational, but he'd at least decided on a name for that one: TFNS Horatio Nelson. When Miriam had asked who that was, he'd told her she could bloody well look it up.

He thought of those gargantuan monsters--he would, he suppoled, probably call them supermonitors--and of the wholesale refitting of the other Fleet units, and, not for the first time, he was awed and even a little frightened by the Faustian dynamism of the Rim society. He never realized (no one did, except Miriam Ortega, and she only dimly) that it was he who had tempered that unique human metal into the terrible weapon now poised to strike. It struck on the twenty-third standard day after Trevayne had been piped aboard Ortega.

They'd counted on the rebels rejecting another pincer after their earlier disaster and made their own deployment accordingly. Their mobile units--notow officially listed by the TFN as Fourth Fleet-- covered the Gateway, but the orbital forts which once had protected it did not. They'd been repaired, refitted, and towed across the system to join the handful of new forts protecting the Back Door.

There was a reason for that redeployment, and the rebels were about to discover it.

Trevayne spoke a few quiet words, and the orders went out, setting in motion long-prepared contingency plans, both in space and on Xanadu. The fleet uncoiled itself from the Gateway in response, reaching out on the flag plot like gleaming tendrils of light. And on the planet, sirens screamed and civil defense teams sprang into orderly action. Kevin Sanders" briefing might stress the rebels' promise to avoid further strikes on populated worlds so long as the Federation did likewise, but Ian Trevayne would take no chances. There would be no mass murder on Xanadu.

He watched his secondary plot--the one tied directly into the Back Door fortresses--and his hard smfie tightened as a crazy quilt of explosions erupted about the warp point. The hordes of tiny robotic spacecraft with their loads of homing missiles were taking a beating, he thought coldly. SBMHAWK carriers had always been largely immune to minefields, for it was hard for the hunter-killer satellites to target something so small, and harder still for them to catch the agile, wildly evading packs before they stabilized their launchers and fired. That was what made them so deadly against fixed defenses like OWP'S... until Zephrain RDS had supplied an answer: a new mine with vastly improved tracking systems and a far higher attack speed. Their attack radius was shorter than for conyen-tional mines, and their lighter warheads were largely ineffectual against shielded and armored warships, but they were deadly against the unprotected SBMHAWK'S.

Their shorter range required denser patterns and there had been insufficient time to build enough for both warp points. But Trevayne and his staff had reasoned that the rebels would prefer the Back Door to the long-established Gateway defenses, and placed their limited supply accordingly.

"Skywatch says the new mines took out ninety-plus percent of the missile packs before launch, Admiral," Yoshinaka reported crisply. "Operational orders transmitted to mobile units and acknowledged.

All ships closed up at action stations and redeploying towards the Back Door. All civil defense procedures implemented on Xanadu." "Thank you, Commodore," Trevayne acknowledged formally, his eyes on the main battle display. Any moment now, he thought.

The rebels received the first of several surprises as their lead units emerged to find their attack warp point still covered by heavy OWP'S. Vice Admiral Josef Matucek, commanding the Republican van, watched in horror as his superdreadnoughts warped into a holocaust of close-range beam fire. Shields flared like paper in a furnace as the heavy batteries of energy weapons--energy weapons which should have been blasted to rubble by the torrent of SBMHAWK'S-- ripped his ships apart.

It was incredible! How had they survived? And having survived, where was that hurricane of force beams coming from? Every Terran fortress designer was imbued with the necessity of balancing force beam and primary beam armaments--the former to batter down shields and armor at close range when the capital ships came through; the latter to eerate the hangar bays of the carriers in the follow-up Xvaves--but those forts couldn't possibly mount anything but force beams! There was no room for anything else, and their heavy fire gutted the leading Republican ships. Fragile datalink systems collapsed in electronic hysteria under the pounding, and the superdreadnoughts had to fight as individuals, surrounded by those demonic fortresses like mastodons besieged by tigers.